an old story: Plato's
philosopher in the cave, the saint in politics, the modern poet in the
world of war, {51} commerce, or industry: the eye that sees heaven
often blunders on earth. Milton's divorce pamphlets, like nearly all
his controversial writings, have three fatal defects. They are utterly
blind to the temper of those to whom they were addressed, to the
reasonable arguments of opponents, and to the practical difficulties
inherent in their proposals. He argues that, as the law gives relief
to a man whose wife disappoints him of the physical end of marriage, it
is an outrage that he should have none when deprived of the social and
intellectual companionship which is its moral end. But he takes no
note of the awkward fact that the dismissed wife is not and cannot be
in the same position as she was before her marriage. Nor does he give
the wife any corresponding rights to get rid of her husband. These,
and a hundred other difficulties all too visible to duller eyes, he
utterly ignores as he proceeds on his violent way of deliverance from
what he calls "imaginary and scarecrow sins." Nothing is allowed to
stand in his path. For instance, the awkward texts in the Bible, whose
authority he accepts, are given new interpretations with which it is to
be feared his temper had more to do than his knowledge of the meaning
of Greek words. But {52} there is not a hint of his own case in all he
says, and it is not desertion that he discusses but incompatibility of
temper. Masson even sees reason to think that he began the first
pamphlet before his wife left him, but when, no doubt, her unfitness to
be his wife was only too evident. However all that may be, we can only
think with wondering pity of those summer weeks of 1643 and of the two
years which followed. Everything in Milton's life and writings shows
him a man unusually susceptible to the attraction of women, one whose
love was of that strongest sort which is built on a chastity born not
of coldness but of purity and self-control. Such a man, in such a
plight, with the added misery of knowing that he owed it to his own
rash folly, may be pardoned for forgetting the true bearing of his own
doctrine that laws are made for the "common lump of men." Cases like
his are the real tragedies, the tragedies of life so much more bitter
than the more visible ones of death; and no thinking or feeling man
will lightly decide that they must remain unrelieved. But neither
M